About Toon Boom Harmony

Toon Boom Harmony is a powerful production tool that provides artists and studios with the award-winning technology used in blockbuster films, TV series, webisodes, advertising, games and many other productions.

Harmony Server combines the animation toolset of Harmony with a database for collaborative workflow to share assets, batch vectorize and render, as well as increase production efficiency.

The technology in Harmony gives artists the freedom to create any style of animation—from processing paper drawings by scanning and painting them (ink & paint) to paperless animation, where the drawings are digitally created frame-by-frame, all the way to cut-out animation, where the artist creates rigs that are animated by moving, rotating, stretching, squashing and deforming each drawing piece, or even a combination of any or all of the styles. Harmony also supports hybrid 2D/3D productions with features including a 3D camera, multiplane environments and the ability to import 3D models.

Harmony also provides all the tools to create special effects, streamlining the production pipeline by reducing the need to use third party tools that add steps to the production process. Harmony Server enables artists to collaborate in real time when working on a project by sharing scenes and assets from a central database when they are on a local network. For artists who are not on a local network, a web interface provides access to the assets they need.

Harmony also works with other software by importing and exporting a wide variety of industry standard file formats. Harmony can also integrate easily with other pipelines. Harmony is a 64-bit application that takes advantage of the memory and multi-core processors of modern workstations.

Harmony works with Toon Boom Storyboard Pro for all pre-production phases. Therefore, animatics created in Toon Boom Storyboard Pro can be imported seamlessly in Harmony for animation and scene setup guidance.

Control Center

The Control Center module controls the database and organizes the production. The Control Center module is used to create the environments, jobs and scenes, as well as importing and exporting scene packages. The technical director or system administrator also uses Control Center to create the login information for users to access the database.

Control Center is also available in a web form where users can access scenes via the Internet—seeWeb Control Center.

To learn more about Control Center, refer to the following guides:

Installation Guide

Harmony Server Guide

Harmony

Harmony Premium, Harmony Advanced, and Harmony Essentials are the core of Harmony. It comprises all the major drawing, animation and compositing features. It is used to work in the scene: design, character breakdown, cut-out animation, traditional animation, ink and paint, exposure sheet, timeline, effects, compositing, camera moves, colour styling, and so on.

The render resolution for the various editions of Harmony are:

Harmony Essentials: 2K (2048x1556)

Harmony Advanced: 4K (4096x3112)

Harmony Premium: Unlimited

NOTE: To create scenes with Harmony Stand Alone, you must use Harmony Premium, Harmony Advanced or Harmony Essentials. You cannot create scenes in Stage with Harmony Server; you require the Control Center module.

To learn more about Harmony Premium, Harmony Advanced and Harmony Essentials, refer to the following guides:

Getting Started Guide

User Guide

Reference Guide

Preferences Guide

Keyboard Shortcuts Guide

Scripting Guide

Utilities Guide

Paint

Paint module is a subset of the Harmony Premium module. It contains the drawing, painting and colour styling tools. It is mainly used in large traditional animation studios to maintain a structure and avoid users having to learn the full product application. This way, the colour styling or ink and paint team can concentrate on their task without having to deal with the compositing and timing tools.

To learn more about the Paint module, refer to the following guides:

Paint Guide

Paint Preferences Guide

Play

The Play module is used to play back the rendered image sequences enabling the user to view the final scenes and compositing results.

To learn more about the Play module, refer to the following guides:

Play Guide

Scan

The Scan module is used to scan drawings in batch. It creates a drawing list from the timing and exposure previously created in the exposure sheet via the Harmony Premium module.

NOTE: It is possible to scan the drawings from a TWAIN device directly in the Harmony Premium module.

To learn more about the Scan module, refer to the following guides:

Scan Guide

Web Control Center

You can access your database via the Web Control Center. When you're running a studio, you will most likely have a database set up. This enables all the artists working on your production to share the same scenes and assets.

The Web Control Center lets you host this database on the Internet. This way, freelancers can log in from anywhere with an Internet connection. Then they can download a scene from the database, work on it, and upload it again.

You no longer need to spend time copying files to an FTPor require an administrator to export and import files from the database. You can do it all directly through the Web Control Center.

To learn more about the Web Control Center, refer to the following guides: